Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (11 page)

“Yes.”

“These are excellent potatoes.”

“Pepper? Butter? What else can I get you?”

“Are you still taking seconds?” Hattie asks her sister-in-law. “I remember you shoveled in heaps of food and never put on weight.”

Judah hears them hunting comfort in the topic of the food. He has his chin to his chest. He stares at his wife, seeing where she has coarsened, sees the lines around her neck that had been seamless once. They talk about him now as if he cannot hear.

“I’ve been tending to him,” Hattie says.

“Yes.”

“Night and day.”

“I’ll bet he takes some tending to.” He takes this as a compliment.

“Seven days of the week,” Hattie says.

“I’m glad I’m here. I hope to be some help.”

“I’ve not needed help,” Hattie says, “I’ve done it night and day these seven days a week. He just needs attention is all.”

“I do know that.”

“You simply can’t imagine,” Hattie continues. “I look at him sometimes in church. And it’s just the saddest face; you let him settle down and think there’s no one watching and it’s the saddest face you’d ever want to see.”

“I wouldn’t want to see that,” Maggie says.

“No. Of course not. Not if you can help it.”

“We . . .”

“He may have been your husband once, but”—and there is sniffing virulence in his sister’s face again—“let me tell you, he’s changed.”

Judah shaves with a strop razor; that is consistency in change. What he touches has grown pliable and takes on his palm’s sweat. The blue spruce tree he planted to signal Ian’s birth was higher than Ian to start with, then smaller since it grew less quickly, then taller since it continued to grow. He wonders why he has no memory of pain. He would will himself into remembrance or anticipation, but the pain is not corporeal, any more than pleasure is corporeal when done. Judah is glad about that. If he could balance pain and pleasure off, he figures pain would weight the scale considerably; he’d have to have been sporting fifty or five hundred times to cancel out one broken leg.

He’d heard the heart stopped beating in three different ways. It stopped, Doc Wiggins said, when you sneezed or climaxed or died. You only die once, Judah said, and you come maybe five thousand times, or if you’re lucky ten. In the oblivious intervals he tended to his business—not pleasure and not pain.

“Well, what about sneezing?” asked Wiggins. You could sneeze six times in succession if you breathed back hay chaff, say, and it would take a lot less energy than sporting; it would wring him dry a whole lot more efficiently. So one was pain and one was pleasure and one was by and large indifferent, and he would choose, if forced to choose, that heart-stopping sneeze as the best way to go.

Wiggins recited his ditty, “I sneezed a sneeze into the air. It fell to earth I know not where. But hard and cold were the looks of those, in whose vicinity I snoze.”

Judah laughed. “Still and all,” the doctor winked at Judah. “Still, judging by available receptacles, I’d a deal sooner hope to empty myself by that other device for emission. If you take my meaning.”

“Yes,” Judah said. “I do. You piss-ant simple son of a whore. I take it well enough.”

“What did you call me?”

“If recollection serves,” said Judah, “a piss-ant simple son of a whore. But I meant it kindly,” and he grinned at Wiggins who backed off, bristling, abject.

“Jude.”

“Yes?”

“Jude, I say.”

“I hear you,” Judah says.

“Judah, are you listening?”

“I heard you the first time,” he says.

“What was I saying?”

“Well, what was I saying,” he mimics, word-perfect.

“Before that?”

“Jude-boy, are you listening?” His voice rises, parroting hers.

“You never listen to me,” Maggie says. “You don’t hear a thing I tell you.”

“I’m listening,” he says.

Why does she counter him, she asks herself; what drives her to it, drove her north and to his side like a night nurse who prefers hot mustard poultices to balm, who uses rubbing alcohol to staunch each wound; why not submit if all he needs for peace is her enforced submission? The guises multiply and then persist and then it isn’t clear which one is truthful, which a disguise; age cannot wither, she remembers, nor custom stale. But age does wither and custom does stale and there’s no infinite variety to what she’s learned or where (has said this to her analyst also—that she’d left Sarah Lawrence after two years, not seeing the point of it, not wanting to call Bronxville the Athens of the Bronx, wanting real grape arbors and not the hundred yards of trellised walkway they thought of as a conduit to universal learning, not needing little needy men to tell her there were large ones once, nor willing to believe her breathless labored whirling would be the future of dance); her grasp and reach an octave only, not enough.

So she argues with him just to keep her hand in: forgive but don’t forget. That’s her motto, she tells Judah, you say tomato and I say tom-ah-toe; you say potato and I say pot-ah-toe,
salad days
, the wilted scrap of what had seemed to be love’s feast. We’re old-time adversaries, husband, and I’d rather disagree with you than agree with most.

Now each of them wonder, is this all? Is habit’s hold unbreakable and will they sit to supper forever and ever, as if betrayal and revenge were topics like the quality of meat? Good manners, Hattie said, mean never discuss what you’re eating. You can compliment the cook, but that’s as far as it goes; you should never talk about the food being tasted at table. There had been stews, she’d heard, in which men were served up their sons. The proper thing to do would anyhow be compliment the cook and then, when you learn what you’ve eaten, to provoke a duel.

So politeness is the order of the day. Politeness means that Maggie serves Finney, and no one hurries Judah’s carving when he drops the knife. No one says, “Here, let me help,” or “Would you like to let me try?” or any of the phrases that might make things bearable (his shaking pronounced now, the blood leaking out of the undercooked steaks—not rare, not raw even, just bloody and expensive pulp, the blade making scant progress against that ten-pound fibrous lump, and none of them hungry anyhow, none of them able to do justice to Morrisey’s best). No one refuses potatoes when the white slop sticks to the spoon; nobody mentions that the carrots should have been washed and peeled. It has to be deliberate, Maggie tells herself; it has to be a parody of meals they shared before. Yet Judah eats with concentration, chewing on his mouthfuls like something in a stable, shifting it from side to side in the forefront of his mouth. She herself—she answers Hattie—has no appetite.

“Why’s that?” the old woman asks. “You always used to eat.”

“I ate on the bus,” Maggie says.

“They’ve got nothing there.”

“In Albany,” she says. “At the terminal. There’s a cafeteria and I wasn’t sure what time we’d be eating.”

“Correction,” Judah says. “You weren’t sure you’d get to eat.”

“What does that mean?” Finney asks.

“It means she didn’t know for certain I’d be there. It means she worried where her next square meal was coming from, that’s what.”

Candles flare. In the soft light and flicker, his skin smoothes. Hattie toys with her food. She arranges it in segments on her plate, then shifts the right-hand portion to the left, the left right. She mashes her potato, the fork tines giving slightly when she forces. She makes a pyramid of meat.

“You’re not eating,” Judah says.

“Yes I am,” says Hattie. “It tastes good.”

“You’re lying,” Judah says.

“We call it table manners,” Maggie says.

So they attempt to please him, bending to their plates again, and suddenly this seems to Maggie the story of her history: a supervised consumption when all appetite is gone. She straightens, rejecting her food. “Jude, I’ll be sick if you force me to finish this.”

He grins at her and says, “That’s the little lady. That’s the one I married.”

“Why serve us this?”

“Because I need to see just how much shit the others will swallow,” he says, and touches her arm, conspiratorial. “Because there’s no limit to what certain people can eat.”

“Judah,” Hattie says. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

“These slops”—he gestures. “These pig leavings. This crap I had prepared for you to watch you at the trough.” He sweeps his plate backhanded and it crashes against the fireplace wall and falls and spills but does not break. They watch it teeter. “I been waiting,” Judah says, “for one of you to say just one thing all this meal. Just once to tell me what you thought of what we put before you. Every step of it’s been planned.”

“Fine,” Maggie says. “So you serve us a second-rate dinner . . .”

“Who in heaven’s name cares?” Hattie asks.

He had been making it, was faking weariness and sickness when it came to him that she needed someone young and hale as he, Judah, was once; he presses his legs together and feels his pants’ fabric compress. He does not move. He hears his heart’s pulse amplify and echo from his chest to ears, then wrist. He is his own best audience, the kid who gapes forever at the card trick that he never learned, the one who always says “Again, again,” and sits there openmouthed, letting flies feed off his tongue. He says four queens, hell, that’s terrific, hell, I could have sworn—when every second card’s a queen, except he doesn’t know it; riffle the deck in the other direction and it’s only queens; his legs go weak. His lungs are weak. His arms that had been tempered steel (“Like a sword,” she’d say. “You draw your arms out from that undershirt like some proud swordsman”) are rust-riddled, breakable. He can remember toting water to the house; the wells went bad one summer, and he had to fetch and carry everything they drank. With clarity now for the first time he feels that what he’d faked is real, that all the fraud was worthless since it also stood for truth, and Judah is in mortal straits, is mortal, is cut out to die.

They draw back from the table. He says he’ll sit a little while; it isn’t all that often you give the world away. Maggie leads Finney into the room’s far alcove, then turns to him, speaking softly. “What is it you’re after, Samson?”

“How do you mean?”

“You understand what I’m asking. Just tell me what’s the point of this and I’ll know how to play.”

“It’s not a game.”

“It’s not all that serious either.”

“For Judah,” Finney acknowledges, “the point is that you’re here.”

“One bus trip. One afternoon. I didn’t even have to change at Albany; they’ve improved the service.”

“Yes.”

“One one-way ticket, it’s nothing to fuss about, Samson. What’s the fuss?”

“The will,” he says. “You heard him.”

“Yes, it’s mine. I’ve said my thank-yous; I’ll say them again. So what?”

He stares at this quicksilver creature and thanks God he never married. There were times, he wants to tell her, when he’d been tempted to get on his knees and there’d been candidates enough for Mrs. Finney, in case she thought the opposite, in case she didn’t know. He eats a Ritz cracker, no cheese, and the crunching sound seems loud.

“You haven’t answered me,” she says.

“It’s a legal document—or will be once I get it witnessed.”

“And then?”

“It’s watertight, like seeing snow on the ground and deducing it snowed. Which would stand up in court . . .”

“I don’t . . .”

“Been thinking how best to explain it,” Finney says. “You get the place lock, stock, and barrel once it’s notarized.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?” He pops his tongue. He selects a second cracker from the bowl.

“Someone.”

“Not that I know of. It’s provided for. I’m sorry about Ian, but it’s the way he wanted it.”

“I’m not talking about Ian.”

“Seems your boy wanted it this way. He’s the one who didn’t show. If he’d only come . . .”

“That’s not what I mean,” Maggie says.

Now it’s his turn to stand there quizzical, awaiting explanations. Finney runs his tongue across his teeth.

“It’s Judah you’re forgetting.”

“I don’t follow.”

“He’s got to die first, Samson. That’s what makes it legal and a—what did you call it?—binding document.”

He focuses. He had taken off his glasses when they sat to table.

“Until that time”—she nears him—“it’s a piece of paper, right? Just a statement of intention, am I right?”

“Well.”

“I could give it all away, correct? I could give it all to Ian, for example.”

“In your turn,” he starts to say—but she is hissing at him, so near now he smells the perfume.

“Correct?” she says.

“That’s true. There’s no proviso . . .”

“But
after
. Not till after. While Judah lives it’s his and I am his and he can rearrange it anytime. Just call you in one afternoon and say, for instance, today my wife forgot to squeeze the orange juice, I want her out of the will. She talked back to me this noon and I don’t like her yellow dress so I’m writing her out, understand? He’s done it before; he did it this evening to Ian, so who’s to say he won’t again?”